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While we do share the labor concerns of the original Luddites, the truth is many AV opponents — including us, the authors — are tech workers ourselves. From experience, we know that “move fast and break things” might work fine when creating pure software, where changes and reversions can be made quickly. But where software interacts with the real world, that approach is naive at best and harmful at worst.
Company
Autonomous vehicles are quite possibly San Francisco’s most controversial new technology. In recent months, robotaxis have prompted public outrage by interrupting public emergencies, rolling over a fire hose during a house blaze and, in another instance, narrowly missing a light-rail car. A cohort of anti-autonomous vehicle activists in San Francisco has even taken to placing traffic cones on the hoods of Cruise and Waymo robotaxis to literally stop their progress. But most disabled AVs get stuck on their own, in far more dangerous or inconvenient places. For example, AVs have become a huge problem for first responders. The San Francisco Fire Department recorded 55 incidents of interference with their vehicles, and many more are inevitably coming – which is part of the reason the San Francisco city attorney has filed for a rehearing of the CPUC’s decision.
Waymo is full speed ahead as safety incidents and regulators stymie competitor Cruise
Meanwhile, several other players, including Cruise and Mobileye, say they're planning to launch large-scale commercial services by 2023. But plenty of self-driving companies have blown past self-imposed launch deadlines in the past, so it's not clear if that will actually happen. The impact with the barking lot barrier arm is also one of concern.
GM’s big bet on driverless cars turns sour
Robocar 2023 In Review: The Fall Of Cruise - Forbes
Robocar 2023 In Review: The Fall Of Cruise.
Posted: Thu, 28 Dec 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]
I have worked with pretty high-scale systems before Waymo, at Google and Ericsson, and this is a pretty staggering scale. But the only number I can tell you is 25,000-plus virtual vehicles driving continuously, 24/7, learning from each other, and [tens of] billions of miles in simulations. Think of how much you or I drive in a year – we drive, what, 10,000 miles in any given year…?
Different business models
While it is harder to deal with moving objects, parking lot barrier arms are expected to move and the Waymo system should be ready for that. The sign being blown by the wind and the rolling shopping cart are also items you would expect humans to hit from time to time. In other news, Waymo has also announced it has begun testing in Los Angeles with no safety driver on board, suggesting operations there may be imminent. Things are growing – to give you an idea, this year we have more than 10x'd [trips with public riders]… The ridership is increasing in both Phoenix and SF.
Will Alphabet's Waymo and GM's Cruise Ever Get the Tesla Premium? - The Motley Fool
Will Alphabet's Waymo and GM's Cruise Ever Get the Tesla Premium?.
Posted: Sat, 28 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Waymo's rival Cruise halted its service last fall after a slew of incidents, including a grisly one where a self-driving Cruise dragged a pedestrian who had been hit by a human-driven car. The disengagement reports are widely disparaged as being, at best, meaningless and, at worse, misleading. Companies have a lot of discretion about when to disengage, the testing environments aren’t uniform, and it’s difficult to make an apples-to-apples comparison between companies.
Electric vehicles, charging and batteries
Cruise is all-in for shared, urban mobility, and Ammann has taken the bold step, for a former Detroit Big Three executive, of arguing that it's time to end the era of personal car ownership. More worrisome to me was that on one of my trips — to a Warriors game at the Chase Center arena — at a busy intersection, a Waymo in front of us wouldn't respond to a traffic cop trying to wave it through a red light. Then another Waymo pulled up beside it and also didn't respond to the cop. So now three Waymos were sitting there, blocking traffic and waiting for the light.
Cruise drove fewer miles — more than 831,000, nearly doubling its 2018 total — and in the second half of 2019, Cruise recorded roughly one disengagement every 20,000 miles, as it increased the total miles it operated during the year. Or maybe it's simply for people who would rather not interact with another human when they're in a taxi. Which is what David Margines, Waymo's director of product management, says is the service's chief appeal for customers right now. And to be honest, I'm not even sure I would always order a Waymo if I had a chance.
Over the summer, as COVID-19 cases in California were peaking, both companies resumed regular operations. Only when the air quality became very poor during the summer’s historic wildfires did Waymo and Cruise pull their vehicles from the road — and only briefly. Over three months, Waymo did 183 trips as part of its driverless pilot, ferried 441 passengers, and traversed 3,057 miles. Its drivered vehicles did 6,313 trips, served 7,963 passengers, and traveled more than 410,700 miles, which includes its driverless pilot trips, as well as educational demo rides and rides given to Waymo employees and one or more guest. Employee-only trips are not reported as they don’t fall under CPUC jurisdiction. Cruise reported 2,783 paid passenger rides in its fully driverless vehicles — quadrupling the number of rides from the previous quarter.
Waymo, for example, generally considered to be the leading autonomous vehicle operator in the world, only drove 628,838 miles, a 56-percent decrease compared to the 1.45 million miles it drove in 2019. That decrease is notable considering Waymo was recently approved to begin accepting passengers in its vehicles in preparation for the inevitable launch of a robotaxi service in California. Cruise and Waymo argue that SF’s streets are unsafe and that AV technology can save lives. Cruise has said that, in simulation, its AVs were involved in 92% fewer collisions as the primary contributor and 54% fewer collisions overall when benchmarked against human drivers in comparable driving environments.
We are well ahead of 10,000 trips [in each city] every single week… So it's going well. We're taking the time to respond to feedback and thoughtfully expand. The amount of simulation we have had to do… has taken a decade. It took Google's level of infrastructure because even to simulate at that scale, as you and I are speaking right now, 25,000 vehicles in our simulator are learning to drive better. To bring that, you need incredible infrastructure capability because even if you had the AI capability, without the infrastructure, it'd be very hard to bring that skill to bear – a decade of investment into AI before AI was cool.
Bird has just –$1.8 million in free cash flow, and its total operating expenses in Q2 were $36.1 million. Maybe the company’s new CEO will be able to turn the ship around. Cruise has started testing its self-driving vehicles in Atlanta. Hotz's ultimate goal is for Comma to be the Android to Tesla's Apple. That is, if Tesla emerges as a clear leader in self-driving technology, other automakers will need to license their own self-driving technology to compete with Tesla. Hotz hopes that Comma's software will become an industry standard among automakers, much as Android is an industry standard for smartphones not made by Apple.
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